A chilling dispatch from Afghanistan: It's a war that CAN'T be won

By DAVID JONES

Last updated at 22:19 22 February 2008

The two dogs didn't seem to want to fight at all. When the green tarpaulin that separated them fell - the signal for battle to commence - they gave one another a friendly lick and engaged in some playful sparring.

Gathered in a scenic natural amphitheatre in the snow-clad foothills of Kabul, however, the crowd of some 3,000 Afghan men were incensed at this 'cowardly' display.

They showed their disapproval by jeering and hurling great slabs of ice at the beautiful Asian breeds, whose ears had been lopped off to stop them being chewed, and whose luxuriant fur had been daubed with purple-and-gold paint to make them appear more ferocious.

So, after being prodded and cajoled by their owners, these most reluctant warriors were forced to join battle. For ten stomach-churning minutes the blood and spittle flew as they bit and clawed at one another with terrifying ferocity, spattering the slushy ring with crimson.

It was only when one yelped so shrilly that his cries echoed around the mountains that the judge - a ghoulish figure in muddy white robes with a chest-length grey beard - brandished his whip to call a halt to the carnage.

Watching this Friday morning Afghan "sport" (a popular prequel to noon-day prayers) at the behest of my interpreter - an enthusiast who thought it would be rather like attending a British football match - I began to wonder what sort of people our soldiers were fighting and dying for.

Indeed, it even fleetingly occurred to me that Afghan society might not have been a mite more civilised under the tyrannical Taliban, who banned dog-fighting and other forms of traditional entertainment as "anti-Islamic".

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Mission impossible? British troops in Afghanistan face a new Taliban offensive this year

But then, two days later, came the atrocity that reminded everyone what compassion really means to the men in black turbans. Infiltrating the almost non-existent security at another dog-fight, a suicide bomber slaughtered more than 100 spectators, including a regional military commander presumed to have been the prime target, plus 35 of his men.

It was the bloodiest Taliban attack since December, 2001, when they were ousted from power; and viewing the devastation on TV, one could only be thankful that it had happened 300 miles away in Kandahar, and not Kabul.

Such is the deadly lottery of life in Afghanistan, more than six years after coalition forces arrived with a mission to eliminate the architects of 9/11 and pave the way for democracy: something the country has never enjoyed in the 130-odd years since the British and Russians turned it into a I first set foot in this haunting, benighted country five years ago this month. Back then, flying into a Kabul airport whose potholed runway was still flanked by the burnt-out relics of jet-fighters, and where the only adornment was a poster warning of landmines, there was an air of optimism.

In the bombed-out ruins, families may have shivered and starved around braziers, but they were free, at least. It seemed only a matter of time before they would have sufficient to eat and live without fear, after three decades of subjugation and civil war.

For we British, and indeed any Western visitors in those days, the welcome was almost embarrassingly warm. After all, we had not only played a major part in vanquishing the then universally detested Taliban, but promised generous military and financial aid: essential building blocks for this new, democratic Afghanistan.

On returning this month, I hoped to find signs that a prosperous, secure, egalitarian country was starting to take shape. Yet, depressingly, I have discovered an Afghanistan that is, in many ways, darker, more bitterly divided - and certainly far more dangerous - than the place I remember.

An Afghanistan where gratitude towards the international community has faded, and a growing number of ordinary people are hostile to our presence - even though our departure would, inevitably, see the Taliban return to power.

Chris Alexander, the UN Secretary General's deputy special representative in Afghanistan, plays up the positives: six million children back in school (including two million girls banned under the Taliban); more than 85 per cent of the country served by local health clinics; a sizeable weapons disablement programme; 14 banks where none existed before; the hope of Afghanistan paying for her own budget by 2011.

However, Matt Waldman, head of policy for Oxfam International, paints a gloomier picture. He reminds me that one-in-five Afghan children still dies under the age of five; half are malnourished; and this winter more than 750 died from hypothermia.

A staggering $15billion of humanitarian aid may have been pumped in since 2001, but of that, some 40 per cent has gone straight back into the pockets of foreign contractors making fat profits from the reconstruction effort.

But it doesn't take statistics to tell you that Lord Ashdown (humiliatingly rejected for the post of UN special envoy to Afghanistan by the increasingly anti-British President Hamid Karzai) was right when he described it as a "failed state".

Nor will it wash, any longer, for the holier-than-thou Karzai and his ministers to heap all the blame for this failure - which the Taliban are exploiting to maximum effect - onto Britain, America and the rest.

That much is clear from the moment you step off the plane.

If it is true that an airport is the window on a nation - New York's JFK with its paranoid security; Heathrow with its endless queues and ranks of black cabs - then heaven help Afghanistan.

Merely to negotiate one's way to the car park at Kabul International, one must run a menacing gauntlet of spivs, chancers and hand-out merchants.

You want to avoid having every item of clothing removed from your suitcase in a 'security' check? That'll be $20 "baksheesh". Want to clear customs quickly, no questions asked? "That's another $10."

So what became of the new Afghan police force, whose first batch of eager young recruits I watched being trained by the Germans five years ago?

You might well ask. Sadly, they lead the demand for cash backhanders from the public they are supposed to be protecting.

"Robbers in grey uniforms," sniffed my oldest Afghan friend, now employed by one of the international security companies whose muscle is all that protects the government, aid agencies and businesses from Taliban insurgents and the new Afghan Mafia barons.

Or at least they did until last week, when Karzai summarily announced that these foreign protection firms were to be banned so that his cronies could run their own monopoly.

Small wonder, then, that Kabul - where I once felt safe enough to go jogging alone at dusk - is now a city under virtual siege, particularly for foreign visitors.

Almost every major building is surrounded by a high, razor-topped wall. And at night, when the streets are bathed in an eerie halogen glow, weaving through the rat-run of concrete barriers manned by balaclava-clad gunmen is an unnerving experience.

You are never quite sure whether you are being stopped by a policemen, insurgent, or would-be kidnapper. In Kabul, kidnapping is the new epidemic, the most recent victim being a prominent trader whose severed ear was posted to his family along with a $1.5million ransom demand.

But after a recent wave of bloody attacks, the latest and most shocking of which claimed the lives of an untold number of foreign guests and staff at the new Aga Khan-owned Serena Hotel, no one is in any doubt about the Taliban's capability to strike at the heart of the city.

When they return from their safe winter havens in Pakistan, the consensus is that even more murder and mayhem is in store.

One senior Western diplomat told me that spring 2008 threatens to be "the hottest yet".

Inevitably this grim prognosis is having a devastating effect on business. Foreign investment, Afghanistan's lifeblood, has slumped by 50 per cent in the past year.

Chic new stores and restaurants face closure if sales don't pick up soon; but who can stomach haute cuisine after negotiating a security entrance as elaborate as Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie?

The sense of impending doom was given credence when, via my resourceful fixer, I found myself talking to Abu Tauyeb, a notorious Taliban commander who claims to control 14,000 fighters in six provinces from Kabul to Kandahar.

An articulate graduate in his mid-30s whose cousin holds down a high-powered job in London, Tauyeb spoke via an echoing mobile phone from his base across the snow-capped Khyber Mountains.

"This spring I will lead a massive offensive to drive the infidels out of Kabul," he said in measured tones. "You will see us engage them in street fighting for the first time, and we will employ other tactics which I won't disclose.

"We can see that the resolve of the infidel forces is weakening but we are growing stronger every day."

It would please me greatly to dismiss his dire warning as bragadoccio. Disturbingly, though, the evidence suggests the commander's assessment is right.

Five years ago, the coalition forces in Afghanistan numbered around 15,000. Today there are more than 42,000 troops, including 7,200 from Britain, and thousands more will soon be deployed.

Yet according to the Senlis Council, a respected international think-tank, some 54 per cent of the country is already back under de facto Taliban control, and their avowed aim of retaking Kabul in 2008 "appears more viable than ever".

This bleak view is supported by Ehsan Zahine, director of Afghanistan's Tribal Liaison Office. "The Taliban have now set up alternative governments in almost every part of the country," he told me.

"In many places, what they say counts for more than the official administration. They are winning people over with a clever mixture of persuasion and intimidation."

I saw what he meant when journeying from Kabul to the chaotic frontier town of Torkham (where the passport-less droves crossed in and out of Pakistan virtually unchecked, and even the official commander told me he did not recognise the legitimacy of the British Raj-created border).

In Shinwari, where U.S. troops allegedly ran amok killing many civilians after being hit by a roadside bomb, we ate lunch to hostile stares and the strains of a Taliban cassette urging people to rise up against the "invaders".

At night in such places, the red, green and black Afghan flag is often hoisted down and replaced with the Taliban's white pennant, with its holy inscription; a telling reminder to people that the men in black turbans are among them.

Uplifting as it was to see smiling girls marching to school with their shiny new aid agency-provided satchels, hundreds of Western-built schools have been shut down because the teachers are too scared to venture inside.

In the southern province of Zabul, I was told, just three of the 170 schools are open. Yet there is a new pragmatism to the Taliban's tactics. To win support in more liberal areas, they allow some schools to be used - so long as they adopt a fundamentalist curriculum.

In these permitted classrooms, A is for Allah and T is for Tora, the sword with which to cut off the infidel's head; so runs the new alphabet of fear.

The Taliban's campaign to win over young Afghans has recently turned to popular culture. The nation's favourite TV programme is Afghan Star, a rudimentary version of The X Factor, complete its own Sharon Osbourne.

However, a young girl contestant is in hiding after receiving death threats because her headscarf slipped down on screen. Hard-line mullahs "encourage" viewers to watch Koran Star, an alternative show whose veiled contestants chant verses from the scriptures.

The coalition strives gamely to counter this propaganda offensive, of course, yet it hardly helps when they hand out free Barbie Dolls wearing skimpy mini-skirts; one of several faux-pas which have caused grave offence.

Apparently forgetting the night-time raids by the Vice and Virtue Police and the summarily chopped-off limbs, some Afghan men told me they were actually happier under the Taliban.

They preferred it when their women were compelled to wear burkas and remain confined to the home, they said; which explains why it remains rare to see a female face in public outside the big cities.

Another common complaint among ordinary Afghans is that they feel like second-class citizens in an "occupied" country.

Under the latest indignity, civilian vehicles are not permitted anywhere near the ubiquitous International Security Assistance Force convoys, in case they might be suicide bombers. Drivers must pull over to the roadside and wait for them to pass.

I understood how demeaning - and scary - this can feel when our four-wheel drive was forced to a halt by a French armoured vehicle, whose machine-gunner trained us in his sights and gesticulated furiously.

All this said, isn't it a bit rich for the Afghans to criticise the foreign troops who are protecting them with their lives, when their own government includes a deeply corrupt rabble of reconstructed warlords and brigands?

On the front page of the Kabul Times last week, for example, the main story centred on the latest outrage perpetrated by Abdul Rashid Dostum.

A sadistic northern warrior chieftain, reputed to have tied enemies to his tank tracks and crushed them alive (and shot one of his wives when he tired of her) he is now chief of staff to the Afghan Army; arguably the second most powerful figure in the Karzai administration

Angered by some perceived slur, it seems, Dostum allegedly sent henchmen to abduct the leader of the Turkmen tribe, Akbar Bay, and members of his family, imprisoned them in his Kabul mansion and personally beat them up.

The attorney general briefly considered pressing charges, but decided against it after being advised that it could spark all-out civil war.

A neat little snapshot of the new Afghanistan.

But how can Karzai even begin to stamp out such medieval behaviour, and nurture the sort of ordered society that would present an attractive alternative to the Taliban, when his own family are so deeply mired in scandal?

Embattled in the heavily-guarded presidential quarters, the so-called mayor of Kabul has belatedly sanctioned an anti-corruption investigation which, at the last count, embroiled eight different government ministries.

However, the nepotistic President refuses to allow the probe to extend to his younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is widely accused of running a lucrative drug smuggling racket from Kandahar.

Wali is unofficial governor of the southern province ... which just happens to be one of the main poppy growing regions, and supplies much of the heroin that finds its way onto British streets.

This week, two more British servicemen - Green Howard Damian Stephen Lawrence, 25, and Royal Marine Damian Mulvihill, 32 - were fatally wounded on the front line in Helmand; the 88th and 89th to be killed in Afghanistan.

We can only hope that, one day, the battle will be won, and the inhospitable mountains of Central Asia will give rise to a nation worthy of their courage.

However, after returning to a country that has been hijacked by the corrupt, self-serving officers of a propped-up regime, I fear we're in for a mighty long wait.

Safely beyond reach in their Pakistan sanctuaries, the Taliban and their friends in Al Qaeda must be rubbing their bloody hands with glee - and looking forward to the day when we in the West finally run out of patience.